In 1965, the House Ways and Means Committee estimated that the hospital insurance program of Medicare – the federal health care program for the elderly and disabled – would cost $9 billion by 1990. The actual cost that year was $67 billion.

In 1967, the House Ways and Means Committee said the entire Medicare program would cost $12 billion in 1990. The actual cost in 1990 was $98 billion.

In 1987, Congress projected that Medicaid – the joint federal-state health care program for the poor – would make special relief payments to hospitals of less than $1 billion in 1992. Actual cost: $17 billion.

It’ll be different this time, though. We just have to have Hope.

And, on a sub-rant: for those of you who object to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars on the basis of our ever-expanding debt but who simultaneously support the recent health care initiatives, allow me to slap you upside the head with this:

Medicaid and Medicare cost America more than $650 billion each year. All of defense combined, much less the wars alone, costs around $560 billion per year. Do you understand? Medicare and Medicaid currently costs about $100 billion more per year than total money spent for all branches of the military including equipment, operations, maintenance, personnel and the wars.

And that’s not even getting into the disaster that is Social Security.

How anyone can both deride the debt and simultaneously be in favor of an increased government role in health care is baffling. If it were only ignorant idealists spouting this absurdity it might be more tolerable, but those idealists vote, and so now we have our elected officials defending their wasteful, inefficient monstrosities with comparisons like this:

A triumphant Speaker Nancy Pelosi compared the legislation to the passage of Social Security in 1935 and Medicare 30 years later.

She’s exactly right.

—————MS is a conservative undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley. No, seriously. Berkeley. She has been writing for America’s Right since November 2009.

And don't forget that when talking about the defense budget and spending, it includes all the added pork that had nothing to do with the military – right John F'ing Kerry. How many tens of millions was it that you attached to the current defense budget to build the "Ted Kennedy learning center" at UMass Boston.When it comes to overruns what a few billion here and a few billion there, it's only OUR money they're wasting.

Welcome to the blog – great analysis!I love how conservatives use actual facts to shut down liberal arguments – I'm sure you'll be called RAAACIST very soon!

I really love that you came out of Berkeley with your brain still intact! My son is in ROTC at University of Colorado at Boulder, which is considered second only to Berkeley in terms of left-wing nut cases so it's very encouraging to me that you survived the indoctrination!

Monica has contributed once before — I've just been extremely slow in adding her to the list of contributors. Some of the peripheral stuff gets put on the back burner and, due to my own raging ADD, forgotten.